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Big Wins. Product launches. Funding rounds. These are the moments in a company’s journey that come with a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes. You work hard to get to those big moments; don’t let all that effort fall flat once the moment has passed.

Savvy businesses understand that the actual return on investment of effort often comes in the days and weeks that follow, when fresh leads and heightened brand visibility create a prime window to convert interest into lasting impact. From strategic email follow-ups to leveraging public relations to highlight key wins, a strong post-moment plan is essential for turning momentum into measurable results.

Why momentum matters

Many teams get overly focused on short-term goals rather than long-term success. I equate this to the “launch and forget” mentality, where attention quickly shifts from one project to the next. This results in missed opportunities to connect the dots and build on the momentum gained from the significant event. If you don’t have a clear follow-up plan, you risk losing the value that’s just been generated.

A consistent, cohesive program that builds on success helps create a lasting impact. Follow-up strategies that foster continued engagement, lead nurturing and reinforcement of the company’s messaging are key for building momentum and long-term business growth.

Businesses face several key challenges when transitioning from the big moment to the follow-up, including:

• Effectively managing and prioritizing leads generated during an event
• Staying top of mind: sustaining consistent engagement with prospects after the headlines fade
• Maintaining momentum: ensuring follow-up communications are timely and relevant
• Measuring success: accurately measure follow-up impact like conversions, engagement and return-on-investment (ROI).

Related: Successful Entrepreneurs Are Strategically Outsourcing These 5 Tasks

Strategies for managing and prioritizing leads

Effectively managing and prioritizing leads after a significant company achievement can be the difference between missed opportunities and meaningful conversions. Intelligent lead management starts with a lead scoring system that ranks prospects based on job title, buying intent, budget and engagement level. By assigning scores, businesses can focus resources on the leads most likely to convert.

To maintain momentum, immediately import contacts into a customer relationship management or lead management system. This will help you organize, track and manage ongoing communications. Speed is critical. Making early calls or sending prompt emails to prospects captures their interest while it’s still fresh.

Staying top-of-mind

Nurturing hard-won leads is crucial. Targeted email marketing is key in converting leads. First, this maintains personalized, contextualized and relevant communications that reinforce the connections made during the big moment. Address specific interests, challenges or needs in your follow-up emails to nurture relationships and guide leads through the buyer’s journey. Include relevant content and offers to keep the conversation going.

Other effective strategies for nurturing leads include:

• Automated drip campaigns to deliver timely, relevant content that provides value.
• Social media retargeting to stay top-of-mind by serving tailored ads, exclusive content, such as access to a demo, case studies or whitepapers.
• Personalized phone calls or video meetings can add a human touch. This lays the foundation to build trust, nurture and deepen ongoing relationships.

Businesses can also use creative and/or unconventional methods to stay top-of-mind with leads after the fact. Create personalized content summarizing your event or milestone or sharing insights relevant to each prospect’s interests. Curate a customized bundle of resources based on specific interests and focus areas. Content could include eBooks, case studies, webinars or whitepapers that directly relate to the lead’s business challenges or interests.

Turn outreach into a game with incentives for actions like sharing content, completing surveys or interacting on social media. Create a leaderboard with prizes or rewards for the most engaged leads. Post personalized social media shout-outs to leads, thanking them for interacting with you and encouraging them to stay connected.

Related: 8 Effective Ways to Connect With Your Customer

Measuring success

There are six essential ways to measure the momentum success of your efforts:

1. Lead conversions show how effective follow-up is in converting interest into sales.
2. Email open and click-through rates measure the effectiveness of email campaigns in re-engaging leads and driving them to take a desired action (e.g., signing up for a demo, downloading content).
3. Lead engagement shows how well you maintain interest and keep the conversation alive.
4. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) assess the quality of the leads.
5. ROI evaluates the revenue generated from post-event conversions against the cost of attending the event.
6. Customer retention/repeat business tracks customer retention and repeat sales from leads and can measure the effectiveness of nurturing efforts.

Maintaining momentum

How can businesses maintain momentum to drive long-term growth? It starts with shifting the focus from short-term success to the long game of building lasting relationships and taking a continuous engagement approach. Here are a few specific recommendations.

Provide leads with content that educates, nurtures and positions your business as a trusted resource, not just a vendor hawking its wares. Focus on fostering long-term relationships that can evolve into loyal customers.

Segment your leads based on their stage in the buying process, interests and needs. Then you can deliver more personalized follow-ups that resonate and nurture them more effectively.

Create a community, Customer Advisory Board and/or loyalty program to keep leads and customers engaged. This gives you the best chance of creating advocates/brand ambassadors and repeat buyers. Vendor certification programs are a great example: individuals and partner organizations trained and certified on a specific technology tend to buy that brand. Communities and customer advisory boards are also a source of valuable feedback and insight for product improvements.

Make testimonials, case studies or success stories part of your momentum strategy. People want to buy from people they trust. Social proof like this helps build trust and creates a sense of community around your brand. Track key metrics and continuously optimize your strategies. Adjust your tactics based on this data to improve ongoing engagement.

Work those strategies

To maximize your effort and investment, you need comprehensive strategies for leveraging marketing, PR and lead conversion after significant events and achievements. Use the best practices outlined above to realize ROI as leads become buyers. This will optimize the value of those leads, increase the chances of conversion and create a community of engaged buyers for the long term.

No matter how robust your brand’s customer service is, you can’t avoid negative feedback — noise that can block out all the great things your business offers and does. Social media is rife with videos highlighting incidents where customers feel wronged and the torrent of negative comments that follow. Reviews on Google, Yelp, Facebook, Open Table, TripAdvisor and other platforms are filled with dissatisfied customers, and that can upend a business’s good standing.

Sometimes, there are missteps, and the reviews and feedback reflect a breakdown in service or product delivery. Other times, people are venting or trolling with no cause. You can’t take it personally, but don’t ignore what they say. Customers rely on reviews when discovering or purchasing products and services. Bad reviews can turn them away and cause a reputational crisis for your business.

Your online business reputation depends on a proactive, strategic approach for identifying, monitoring, managing and responding to negative reviews. You’ll seize opportunities to build trust, improve customer service and enhance customer relations.

Related: Your Customers Are Talking About You — Here’s How to Turn Their Feedback Into Profit

Identifying customer issues

If a negative or bad comment appears on social media or one of the consumer review platforms, take a breath and figure out what’s behind the review. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes to see if the review or comment was justified. Go beyond the words and anger to determine where things went wrong. Then respond — genuinely and professionally.

Monitoring online reviews

You won’t know customer dissatisfaction exists without monitoring your online reviews. There are various tools and strategies available to do so. For example, you can use Google Alerts or ReviewTrackers to provide you with real-time alerts when new reviews are posted on platforms like Yelp, Facebook, TripAdvisor and Google.

Also, ensure your business is claimed and verified on the major platforms so you can respond to reviews and receive notifications of activities. Optimize your business profiles. You want potential customers to find accurate, useful information when they are looking up reviews about your brand. Make sure photos, location, hours and business description are up to date.

Managing online reviews

Designate a “review response” team or personnel to respond to reviews. Share these tips with the individual or team responsible for handling reviews:

• Don’t let emotions come into play when crafting responses to negative comments.
• Thank customers for their feedback and let them know your intention to do better.
• If the customer is justifiably dissatisfied, apologize and show empathy without overdoing it.
• Make things right if possible. For example, offer an opportunity to revisit your restaurant with dessert on the house. Send out a replacement product that got lost in the mail at no cost. Offer a discount on a future product.
• If all goes well, encourage the customer to modify the comment with an updated review so others can see your good-faith efforts. When you acknowledge customer dissatisfaction and do what you can to turn things around, you’ll find that these consumers will become your biggest champions and cheerleaders.

In some cases, contact reviewers offline to discuss their experience. During the conversation, ask the customers to update their reviews. If they choose not to update the comment, you can respond online that the issue was resolved.

Related: How to Better Manage Your Brand’s Reputation in the Digital Age

Go beyond the negative, highlight the positive

In dealing with bad reviews, in addition to responding and turning dissatisfied customers into advocates for your business, beefing up your online reputation with positive comments and reviews is equally critical. Positive reviews influence buying behavior and help win people over, even if there is the occasional bad comment.

When asking for a positive review, timing is everything. Encourage reviews at the point of purchase, following an event or fulfilling a service. For example, send a quick text or email saying, “Happy you had a great experience. Would you mind leaving us a quick review?” Make it easy for your customers to leave a comment with a link to the review page.

Make getting positive reviews part of your brand strategy

Train your staff to ask for reviews in their communication. For example, recently, my colleague had an issue with a product that was delivered to the wrong house. It was the delivery service and not the retailer that made the error. The delivery service would not rectify the situation; however, the retailer was happy to send a replacement product. My colleague received an email with an invoice ($0) listing the products reshipped to her home and a gentle nudge to leave a review about the service and resolution. She was more than happy to do so and spread the word.

Respond to positive reviews, too. This shows you care about your customers’ feelings and helps build trust with future reviewers. Don’t be shy about sharing great reviews as testimonials on your website and social media platforms. Other satisfied customers on social will chime in and reinforce the great experience your brand delivers, further boosting your online reputation.

Getting some negative reviews is not all bad. They help you pinpoint areas that need improvement. In addition, they help create a balanced, authentic brand profile. While you want most of your feedback to be positive, having occasional negative comments and responding to them builds trust and credibility.

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DeSario Turner didn’t have the classic take-this-job-and-shove-it moment — no dramatic resignation, no sudden business closure. In fact, she had a successful, stable career at Harley-Davidson, where she held a leadership role managing online ecommerce operations across the U.S. and Canada. She could have comfortably stayed in the corporate world indefinitely.

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Related: Considering franchise ownership? Get started now to find your personalized list of franchises that match your lifestyle, interests and budget.

Image Credit: DeSario Turner | Smoothie King

Bikes to blenders

Turner spent nearly 18 years at Harley-Davidson, serving in various customer-facing roles that ranged from dealership support to managing North American ecommerce. During that time, she also explored several side hustles — from rental properties to vending machines — as part of a larger vision for long-term financial independence.

Turner wanted to go all-in on a business that aligned with her values and offered a product she believed in. When she discovered Smoothie King, the concept clicked. It combined health and wellness, community impact and a scalable franchise model — all things she felt passionate about bringing to her hometown.

After settling on the brand, she began the franchise application process in late 2021 while still working full-time and juggled both responsibilities for nearly two years. “That’s when it really kicked off; it was definitely a busy time,” she recalls. “But I had to make it happen.”

Related: She Was a Lawyer with No Restaurant Experience. Now, She’s Reviving an Iconic Restaurant Chain.

Record-breaking opening

Turner’s Smoothie King location in Racine shattered expectations right out of the gate, breaking the franchise’s record for first-week sales when it opened in 2023. Despite being in a market unfamiliar with the brand, her store generated more than $38,000 in its opening week and quickly became a go-to destination for health-conscious locals.

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By the end of her first year, Turner’s location had already crossed $1 million in net sales — a milestone that placed her store in the top 50 out of more than 1,200 locations in the system.

Related: 70 Small Business Ideas to Start in 2025

Building for the future

Now, Turner has an eye on the future. Her 19-year-old daughter has stepped into a key leadership role at the store, managing day-to-day operations and learning every aspect of the business firsthand. But this isn’t just a job — it’s a long-term investment in her future. Turner is intentionally mentoring her daughter to one day take full ownership, passing down not just a business but a blueprint for independence, responsibility and generational wealth. “Ultimately, this is her business,” she says. “I’m showing her everything now so she understands what it takes — because it’s for her future.”

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Related: I Walked Away From a Corporate Career to Start My Own Small Business — Here’s Why You Should Do the Same

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